Time to put life in the crosshairs

I’m totally off topic today, but it’s that time of year.

It’s almost the end of fall semester, and that means I’ll be intensely busy for the next 3-4 weeks grading projects and presentations. But it’s not all about the students.

The semester’s end overlaps the white-tailed deer hunting seasons in New York and Pennsylvania — my call of the wild. It means I no longer have weekends for grading papers or preparing lessons. I must head to the woods in search of God’s creatures.

I’ve been chasing whitetails in Pennsylvania since 1965, the year I turned 12 and qualified for my first hunting license. My grandfather gave me his .35 Remington a few years later. It has 6 notches on the forearm to mark his deer kills dating back to the early 1940s.

Hunters didn’t shoot a lot of deer back then, as there were damned few around. But I’m told Grandpap and his miner pals had quite a time at their hunting camp near Bradford, Pa.

New York deer came into my sights in 1988 when my friend Blair invited me to his camp near Allegany. I’ve been dropping in nearly every year since, including this past weekend.

The woods were eerily quiet Saturday, with not more than 20 shots fired in or around Cherry Valley all day. Have the deer moved to better feeding grounds? Maybe. But so have the hunters.

Hunting is a dying sport. Long a blue collar tradition, hunting has declined along with the labor population. Few of our knowledge workers are socialized into the sport these days, and firearms training isn’t high on parent’s to-do lists.

With few folks living on farms or in rural areas, fewer have access to hunting land or any day-to-day exposure to wildlife. In my native Pennsylvania, sales of hunting licenses are down 9% over the past decade. The median age of hunters, I’m told, is approaching 50.

(Update: Could be I was wrong about the “dying sport” thing. My friend Blair sent me this link from yesterday’s NYT. Enjoy “The Urban Deerslayer.”)

Venison is pretty much the only read meat we consume in our house. It tastes better than beef, and it’s way better for you. It’s low in fat and contains no growth hormones or antibiotics. It also comes with no “factory farm” guilt. The meat in my freezer roamed the planet freely until stepping into the crosshairs of my .308 Winchester.

I’d like to tell you there’s a social-media or a PR lesson in this post. But I can’t locate the metaphor. It’s just one of those weeks when my mind isn’t on PR. It’s in in a tree stand in Western Pennsylvania — at least until December 12.

And since Pennsylvania doesn’t allow Sunday hunting, we also get to watch the Steelers game. Life is good.

Reflecting on an Excellent Adventure @ PRSA09

From Wikipedia Commons

I spent just 72 hours at the PRSA conference in San Diego last week, and I tried hard to be a good blogger. It didn’t work.

My most popular post, the one about Mike McDougall’s 24-second news cycle, drew just 5 human comments and 111 views. Key message in that post was about ethics in media relations, but I buried the lead. You sometimes make those mistakes on deadline.

Strong words from PRSA veteran over leadership restrictions

Art Stevens

Longtime PRSA leader Art Stevens doesn’t mince words in a scathing editorial posted today at Bulldog Reporter. It is a must-read for all PRSA members. (Special thanks to Judy Gombita for the quick link.)

Stevens’ wrath is directed at the 2009 PRSA Assembly, which last week rejected a bylaw change that would have opened the ranks of PRSA leadership to many more of its members.

A Tale of Two Assemblies at PRSA

Update 11/16/09: Longtime PRSA national leader, Art Stevens writes a strongly worded editorial in Bulldog Reporter this week regarding APRs and national leadership. I agree with Art on this one. It goes well beyond “inside baseball.” A must read for all PRSA members.

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To most of us, the workings of the PRSA National Assembly is “inside baseball.” That is, unless you’re part of the governing body, you tend not to know or care what’s going on. I have little interest in PRSA politics, but I’m struck by what I’m calling “A Tale of Two Assemblies,” one presented by PRSA, the other by newsletter editor Jack O’Dwyer.

Media relations and the 24-second news cycle

Made it to the PRSA conference hall in time to catch a session on Sunday afternoon. Since I’m back to teaching the Media Relations class at Kent State, I decided to take in Mike McDougall’s session called “Working at the Speed of ‘New’: Secrets for Conquering and Surviving the 24-second News Cycle.”

I’m a sucker for titles with colons in them. Must be the academic in me.

Mike, VP of corporate communications and public affairs at Bausch & Lomb, offered some great advice for media relations practitioners, but the media landscape he described worries me – a lot.

PRSA Day One

I landed in San Diego about 11 a.m. yesterday, but didn’t have the time or the access to alert my Twitter friends or my ToughSledding readers. I’m sure you all survived my absence

Everyone is raving about this beautiful city on the bay and its perpetual 72-degree weather. Me? I don’t get it. On Saturday, back in Ohio, we celebrated the end of fall by raking our leaves, then taking a barefoot kayak tour around Sandy Lake and its feeder canal. But here’s the big difference: In San Diego, $250K doesn’t by your squat. In Northeast Ohio, it gets you 2,600 square feet on a private lake.

Okay, I know I won’t be paddling the kayak come January. But I will be skiing the trail around Sandy and celebrating the change of seasons. Like I said, I don’t get California. Let it snow.

A citizen journalist heads for the Coast

I touch down in San Diego Sunday morning for my first PRSA national conference in 8 years. This time, I’m attending not as a PR professional or educator, but as a PR blogger — a media person in search of a story. (Stop your snickering!)

Photo from Creative Commons.

What does this mean? I have no idea. But as a “credentialed journalist” in a tough economic year, I’m not expecting a press room stocked with champagne and caviar. OK, it would be nice. But I’m told PRSA has eliminated the media room altogether, an anachronism from an analog age.

(Update 11/5/09: PRSA email says there is a “media center” at the conference. I stand corrected, but I still don’t need it. Opps! See next update. I guess I DO need it!)

On social change and the role of the PR professional

Photo from opendemocracy.net

When the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, I was a 37-year-old grad student studying social change. Hey, I was a late bloomer!

Each week, as our seminar convened, my classmates found something exciting to discuss as we dutifully applied our sociological theories to the events unfolding in Europe.

Two decades later, I don’t remember much about those theories.